
Open Water
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Narrated by:
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Caleb Azumah Nelson
About this listen
A stunning, shattering debut novel about two Black artists falling in and out of love.
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are respected only for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential debut of recent years.
©2021 Caleb Azumah Nelson. Recorded by arrangement with Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2021 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
"Sur ce sentiment inconnu dont l'ennui, la douceur m'obsèdent, j'hésite à apposer le nom, le beau nom grave de tristesse. C'est un sentiment si complet, si égoïste que j'en ai presque honte alors que la tristesse m'a toujours paru honorable. Je ne la connaissais pas, elle, mais l'ennui, le regret, plus rarement le remords. Aujourd'hui, quelque chose se replie sur moi comme une soie, énervante et douce, et me sépare des autres."
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Excellent
- By Georges Armand on 05-11-17
By: Françoise Sagan
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One of the Good Ones
- By: Maika Moulite, Maritza Moulite
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Jordan Cobb, Carolyn Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When teen social activist and history buff Kezi Smith is killed under mysterious circumstances after attending a social justice rally, her devastated sister Happi and their family are left reeling in the aftermath. As Kezi becomes another immortalized victim in the fight against police brutality, Happi begins to question the idealized way her sister is remembered. Perfect. Angelic.
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Stunning.
- By Pansy on 02-07-21
By: Maika Moulite, and others
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The Discomfort of Evening
- A Novel
- By: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Michele Hutchison - translator
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother’s hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of “blush words” that aren’t in the Bible. One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame.
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Booker winner is a Downer
- By bjs on 09-05-20
By: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and others
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Thunderhead
- By: Miranda Darling
- Narrated by: Abbe Holmes
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Winona Dalloway begins her day—in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet', wake up—she doesn't know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed. On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices—a mind both wild and precise. And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …
By: Miranda Darling
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Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
- A Novel
- By: Lorrie Moore
- Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The summer Berie was 15, she and her best friend, Sils, had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger - until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help - and then everything changes.
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Beautifully written and read
- By EOS STUDIO on 01-11-21
By: Lorrie Moore
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The Rachel Incident
- A Novel
- By: Caroline O'Donoghue
- Narrated by: Tara Flynn
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
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Best narration
- By LG on 01-12-24
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Last Summer in the City
- A Novel
- By: Gianfranco Calligarich, Howard Curtis - translator, Andre Aciman - foreword
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between run-down hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At 30, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich - but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever.
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must check out
- By Anonymous User on 09-28-22
By: Gianfranco Calligarich, and others
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Exciting Times
- A Novel
- By: Naoise Dolan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer. Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than "I like you a great deal".
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It was ok...
- By zobo on 06-25-20
By: Naoise Dolan
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Near to the Wild Heart
- By: Clarice Lispector
- Narrated by: Rebecca Morris
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called "Hurricane Clarice": a 23-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce.
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AMAZING!
- By Gordy on 04-11-18
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Freshwater
- By: Akwaeke Emezi
- Narrated by: Akwaeke Emezi
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side". Unsettling, heart-wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family.
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Just ok.
- By Alexa on 07-02-18
By: Akwaeke Emezi
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Minor Detail
- By: Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette - translator
- Narrated by: Siiri Scott
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims, they capture a Palestinian teenager, and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder.
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Very powerful
- By Phillip Straghalis on 04-09-21
By: Adania Shibli, and others
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
Pretty boring monotone narration.
Two stars for descriptions. Otherwise..a snooze fest.
I'm editing my review after persevering through the first 20 chapters. This story really picks up around it's 22nd chapter. It is really a heartfelt introspection into black immigration masculinity. A genre that doesn't come along everyday. While it may have taken too long to build up, one finally sees purpose in the backdrop the author develops so languarously. The 2nd person narration truly adds up when a man steps out of himself to look at himself.
Read on. It's definitely worthwhile, especially if race, masculinity, and mental health are of interest to you. I'm thoroughly impressed.
initially meh...but...
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Black Love
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A slow burn
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I am conflited
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Love Story Distracted
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Powerful
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Monotone
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Beautiful
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done very well. you will truly enjoy it
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It’s like I never knew words, feelings, could be described as they were. And it was so beautiful.
It talked of a perspective others have tried to describe, yet this book makes it feel as if it were told for the first time.
I cannot wait for a few years, when I forget the details of this book, to be able to read/listen, and once again be reminded.
What a beautiful story
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